The UpTake: CEO and co-founder Georg Petschnigg, a German native, said FiftyThree specializes in “creating tools for mobile creations. We’re building a suite of tools for creativity on the go.” He compares what his company is doing for design on the iPad to what Microsoft did for word processing on the desktop.

P encils may be one of the oldest products on the market, but a tech company based in New York's Tribeca neighborhood is turning pencils and paper into state-of-the-art apps. FiftyThree, a startup launched in 2011 by four former Microsoft staffers, builds stylish apps and electronics tools for writing, sketching and creating.

CEO and co-founder Georg Petschnigg, a German native, said FiftyThree specializes in “creating tools for mobile creations. We’re building a suite of tools for creativity on the go.” Microsoft’s Office “supercharged” the typewriter, and the new mobile apps of FiftyThree enhance designing on iPads and tablets, he suggested.

The founders including Petschnigg, Andrew Allen, John Harris and Julian Walker, met while working at Microsoft. Two were engineers and two designers, and their skills and sensibilities meshed. At Microsoft they developed Office products and next generation interfaces.”We worked on how people play games, listen to music, explore math,” said the 36-year-old Petschnigg.

Its name derives from the fact that most people keep their favorite tools—pen, sketch pad, legal pad, keyboard—within arm’s length of where they sit, which averages out to be fifty-three centimeters.

They opted to stay in New York because “it’s the creative capital of the world. If you’re building tools for creating, you want to be surrounded by a diverse group of people--lawyers, journalists, designers,” he said.

The founders bootstrapped the business to develop and launch their first product, and then raised several hundred thousand dollars from angel investor Shana Fisher, followed by a $15 million boost from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

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